The Jaldapara Wildlife Sanctuary in north Bengal, the only major preserve of the Great Indian Rhinoceros besides the better-known Kaziranga preserve in Assam (India Today, March 31) is fast losing its battle against rhino horn hunters and encroachment from neighbouring settlements.

Only a couple of decades ago, as many as 72 rhinos roamed the grassy savannahs of this 115 sq km sanctuary. Today, only about 22 remain. Three were killed this year alone. Watching this steady depredation are the Jaldapara forest officials, who feel impotent in the face of their twin enemies: poachers and woodcutters.

"As long as a rhino horn fetches its weight in gold, poaching is going to continue no matter what we do," says a forest official hopelessly. Even the busting of a major poaching gang operating in Assam and north Bengal three months ago does not seem to have deterred the poachers - the third rhino was killed at Jaldapara shortly after the crackdown.

"We are fighting an octopus-like organisation which is not the least affected by the loss of one of its parts," confides Jalpaiguri district Police Superintendent R.K. Johri.

Each part of the poaching operation, from the shooting of the animal to the final delivery of its horn to buyers in Hong Kong, is executed by different persons, not one of whom is allowed to have any connection with another.

Thus no link in this poaching chain can be effectively cut without first apprehending one of the top-level coordinators. For instance the forest ranger at Jaldapara, Dhruba Ranjan Sarkar, knows who the sharpshooters in his area are, but, he says: "When we go to arrest them we find no evidence. The shooter is supplied the gun only when the rhino is in sight."

The only way to put an end to poaching, says Sarkar, is to allow forest officials "to shoot a few well-known offenders while they are on a rhino's trail." Forest rangers can shoot poachers only in self-defence, which as he says indignantly, means "we have to get close enough to them so that they can first have a shot at us before we can consider shooting them in turn."

The murder of a young forest officer, Biswanath Mukherjee, last year in the Buxa forest division (of which Jaldapara is a part) has taught forest officials not to be over-zealous on the job.

But the biggest hurdle in the way of anti-poaching measures seems to be the total lack of cooperation from villagers living around the sanctuary.

"Till five or six years ago, the villagers would always cooperate with us and give us advance information on the plans of local sharpshooters," recalls Sarkar. But a rising population and increasing landlessness have forced the same villagers to turn to the forest for a livelihood.

They regularly enter the forest for fodder, firewood and the coveted khair tree (Acacia catechu) which grows in abundance in the sanctuary. Villagers also earn an occasional rupee by passing on information about the whereabouts of rhinos to the poachers.

Forest officials, however, are fearful of taking any action against the aggressive villagers, who enter the forest in hordes.

"We usually have to run for our lives to escape from villagers armed with swords and knives," says a junior beat officer at Jaldapara.

The encroachers are secure in their conviction that the forest guards will never shoot, especially after what happened in February this year. At that time the Moiradanga beat officer shot dead a poacher who had killed a rhino in the sanctuary.

"The villagers created such a problem, entering the forest and creating havoc, threatening to finish us off, that the beat officer finally had to flee from Jaldapara," recounts Sarkar.

It has lately dawned on the authorities that this impasse will end only if the villagers can be involved in the upkeep of the sanctuary.

"We intend to siphon rural development funds to these villages so that landless families have an alternative source of income and don't need to enter the forests,'' says Bengal's Chief Conservator of Forests, Shankar Narayan Misra, outlining a plan that aims at using the state Forest Department as the nodal agency for the development of villages in the forest areas of north Bengal.

The Central Government has been requested to help by including this programme in the Seventh Five Year Plan.

That may be a part of the solution, but as District Commissioner, G. Balagopal points out, what is needed is a "Project Rhino".

At the rate at which rhinos are vanishing from north Bengal there will be none left by the time the state Government's long-term programmes begin taking effect. Balagopal says the second Project Tiger in West Bengal has been set up in Buxa, near the Indo-Bhutan border and tigers are proliferating there.

Ironically, an increasing tiger population is partially responsible for the rhino's decline at Jaldapara. Sarkar has discovered evidence of tigers attacking rhino calves by following pug marks.

"The tiger follows a rhino with her calf for days until it gets an opportunity to injure the calf, which is eventually abandoned by the mother," he says. Forest officials have estimated that at least two calves are born in Jaldapara every year.

Even with poaching - about 40 rhinos have been killed here in the last 20 years - the rhino population would not have declined to just 22 from 72 in 1964 had the tiger population not increased from two to 12 during the same period.

With both man and nature pitted against the rhino, attempts to prevent this vulnerable pachyderm's slide to extinction have paid few dividends. The only options left are: The starting of a "Project Rhino" or the more drastic one of allowing forest officials to shoot anyone entering the sanctuary illegally.

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